J:
So how did Three Percent Enemies come about?
DE: Part of it is that Devon writes more than any human being I’ve ever
known. He’s constantly writing. I probably get a new script a week, at
least. I have more scripts on my computer from Devon than you would
believe, and we’ve done maybe 1/16th of them onstage. There’s so much.
DC: I had written these little shorts -- like the teasers we did. I had
originally just written those as something we could do quickly and not a
lot of fuss. I base them around, obviously, D’Arcy and Jason [Carden]’s
real-life relationship. … We had a stage show we wanted to do called
‘The Thing’ that was a little vaudevillian, that was just me and D’Arcy
-- it was like if you took the Cocktail Hour versions of us and put them
in a narrative. So I wrote five or six of those. Then I had written this
pilot we were going to shoot one day called ‘Imagination Christmas’
about … me and D’Arcy as these characters who have a web comedy called
‘Imagination Christmas.’ It’s just us doing what we do -- like ‘Get A
Life’ -- weird adventures.

DE: Jason and Devon talked for a long time, and we all came up with this
idea.
DC: At first there was a lot of talk for a long time about trying to
make it a show that was an extension of their life … just in their
bedroom for 10 or 15 minutes.
DE: And the locations have been really fun. It’s been fun to go running
down the middle of Times Square with a camera in front of me, or
different apartments, or wherever we’ve been. The locations have
definitely been fun. If you could see the size of our apartment, it’s so
small. The camera crew comes in there and we literally have to move
everything from our one tiny little room into our other tiny little
room, and shoot. Then if we have to shoot in the other tiny little room,
we have to move it [all back].
DC: So we added a character, Lauren’s character. I met Lauren at SNR and
always thought she was very funny. I saw her with The Modern Kids a
couple times and always wanted to work with Lauren, so I figured for
Three Percent Enemies, we needed a D’Arcy for D’Arcy. We needed a
character that was a little crazier than D’Arcy, that had a little more
tunnel vision than D’Arcy. One thing that we really like is people and
characters that are smart enough to be interesting but dumb enough to be
funny. We don’t think of D’Arcy’s character as dumb, just very
distracted by things. Lauren is that next step up in distraction. I like
to think of her as D’Arcy if D’Arcy had never met Jason, basically -- if
she didn’t have that grounding force to keep her from going down the
manhole. Lauren just goes into the sewer -- I don’t know if that’s a
good idea.

So we needed that because you can’t have D’Arcy on all the time, crazy
all the time … like a four year old. And it’s good because I feel like
it humanizes the characters.

DE: And Lauren is fun and wonderful to work with, so the more Lauren the
better. It’s really fun to do this show with people that we get to bring
on. And we’ve only brought on about six people so far, but Devon of
course has already written the next season. We’ve done four and there
are six more that are written, and we have all these dream guest stars
[that we want].

On the last one that came out we got to work with Kyle MacLachlan. That
was a real treat for us.

J: How does that come about?
DC: It’s pretty weird. For a long time me and D’Arcy always talked about
our TV show.
DE: Someday when we get our TV show…
DC: We’ll get this person and this person will be on it because you’ll
be married to them.
DE: This person will play your mom.
DC: We’re very self-centered, so we think that famous people are really
going to like what we do. I asked how could we get Kyle MacLachlan --
Kyle MacLachlan’s going to play himself.
DE: That was the thing. We get so and so to play your mom, and so and so
to play the boss, but Kyle MacLachlan will come on and play himself.
DC: That was a year or two ago before this happened.
DE: We didn’t even have Three Percent Enemies yet. I bet it was two
years ago. And then Jason and Grant worked together at a production
company where Kyle MacLachlan was doing some work, and they showed him …
they were talking with him and he was funny and lovely, and he asked
what they were working on, and they said, ‘Well we have an episode we
could show you.’ They nervously showed him the first episode, and said,
‘If you’d want to be in it and would be interested, we’d love to have
you.’ And he said, ‘O.K. I’ll do it.’ They … [their mouths dropped
open]. We were all furiously IM’ing and texting each other that day. By
the end of the day, Devon had written the scene for him. We sent it to
him, and he said, ‘Sounds great.’ He was amazing to work with and it’s a
super small scene, but any scene takes time, and we didn’t want it to
drag hours and hours. He said ‘I’ll be there at 3.’ He was there at 3 on
the dot, and we had him out by 3:30. As he was finishing up, he said it
was the easiest shoot he’s ever worked on. ‘I’ve had some easy days on
Desperate Housewives, but this was the easiest.’

DC: At the end of the day, being creative people, we don’t really think
much of what we do. We’re confident to a point and we know what we do
and how we do it, and we like what we do, but we don’t know if anybody
else is going to. So to me, it made me feel good and it really said
something to me to have someone like Kyle MacLachlan, who gets paid a
lot for what he does, would like what we do enough to come in for a half
hour.
DE: He’s a class act for sure. And he smells good.
DC: We’ve been pretty spoiled as far as guest stars. … We’re coming down
to the end of the wire of season 1 [of Three Percent Enemies]. We’ve
been doing six-show seasons. The best shows, like ‘South Park,’ do
really short seasons. That’s the best way to do it, because it’s like
‘how are we gonna fill up these 25 shows?’ We’re coming down to end of
that. It’s been fun, looking at it as a whole and creating this universe
and talking about what we will do with callbacks and call forwards.

J: D’Arcy, will your solo show be a character showcase or a lot of
little things that you do as a version of yourself?
DE: It will definitely be more of a character showcase. … It’s a
cohesive …
DC: There’s a little bit of a story, but …
DE: As many characters as we can squeeze in there.
DC: We don’t like creating … there’s nothing wrong with doing characters
but we don’t like doing characters in a vacuum … if we can’t give you a
taste of a world.
DE: Devon really instilled that in me, that we really like to have as
creative … we create a world and stick to the rules.
DC: If you’re someone who’s lucky enough to see all our stuff, there’s
stuff in Three Percent Enemies that came out of the sketch shows …
DE: If you are … one of our friends who’s seen everything we’ve done,
you would know that we used this name and remember that was from
Cocktail Hour or a sketch show, or … our little history, or origin.

DC: We try to stick to that, because we’ve all seen stuff and done stuff
where you can’t picture the character outside that hour or half-hour
that you see them. We try to do characters you could picture having a
house and friends.
DE: In whatever world that may be.
DC: It could be completely insane … they could be flying around or
eating sandwiches. … That’s what we try to do, we try to stick it to the
man. … Another thing, as self-centered as we are, we would also love to
have a book -- a scrapbook about us -- just meaningless stuff like set
lists…
DE: We are so self-centered.
J: As told by?
DE: You can do the … what are those things called in books?
DC: The foreword.
DE: [sing songs] I know things about books.
DC: What was the last book you finished? She reads a lot of books at
once and then doesn’t finish any of them.
DE: What am I reading right now? … I’ve been reading one book for four
years. I’ve started it four times and … ‘this is too hard!’ By page 200
I would throw it away.
DC: She was reading for a reason and that reason made me want to read
it, so … I read it to get through it to talk to her about it, but I
didn’t know she hadn’t finished it.
J: What was the book?
DC: The Blind Assassin.
DE: It’s dense. By Margaret Atwood, quite a dense writer. Great, but …
DC: It’s heavy, like a heavy lunch. That was good, but boy was it heavy.
DE: So creamy, so much meat. Like a salad that’s covered in dressing.
DC: I like Thousand Island dressing. Or ‘Doing the Bartman. … ‘Doing the
Bartman’ is my go-to for the past.
DE: Anything other than this year is ‘Doing the Bartman.’ Five years ago
… or the 1950s.
DC: Industrial Revolution?
DE: Doing the Bartman.
DC: At D’Arcy’s college graduation she was doing the Bartman. … I didn’t
know her then, but trust me, she was doing the Bartman. Hard. To the
max.